Class 15 - Intersection Between Heaven and Earth

by Rebbetzin Leah Kohn

Our previous class, "Sarah's Accomplishment: An Inheritance for Each Jew,"
covered Sarah's ability to connect the physical world to the spiritual, thus
forging for all time a whole new relationship with Hashem. In recognition of
her accomplishment, God bestowed Sarah's home with three miraculous symbols
of her ability to transform the earthly realm into a dwelling place for Him.
This class will detail those blessings and will explore how they remain for
us an eternal inheritance.

The three miracles that graced Sarah's home were as follows: her Shabbat
candles burned all week; her challah was blessed with a Divine satiating
quality; and the presence of God hung over her tent in the form of a cloud.
Each of these physical manifestations had its spiritual significance. By
exploring them one by one, we see how their essence remains a force in our
lives as Jews today.

In contrast to Sarah's Shabbat candles, ours burn for only a few hours,
leaving us without their unique light for the rest of the week. Beyond
Shabbat we are busy working and providing for our basic needs. The candles
mark a departure from this routine, ushering in a singular day of focused
connection to Hashem. For Sarah, there was no such separation between holy
and mundane. Her enlightenment, clarity and relationship to God did not ebb
and flow with the coming and going of Shabbat. As an expression of this
continuum, her candles burned from one Shabbat to the next. In much the same
way, during Temple times, one of the lamps on the menorah attended by the
Kohanim never burned out. This suspension of natural law indicated that
Hashem had deemed the Temple fitting for his presence. Sarah was the first
to usher Hashem into the physical world in this fashion.

As with her candles, Sarah's challah expressed how she redefined the
boundaries of the physical world by infusing it with spirituality. Hashem
embedded a blessing in Sarah's challah, which caused it to be completely
satisfying, no matter how little a guest ate. This by-passed the laws of
nature - where any given quantity is experienced in terms of its limits - and
gave way to a more expansive sense of the physical realm's ultimate,
unlimited source. By giving the challah spiritual characteristics, Hashem
acknowledged Sarah's ability to use material existence as a pipeline to the
Divine. Her bread - a staple of life in this world - became a symbol of the
inherent connection between here and the beyond. Later in Jewish history,
the bread baked in the Temple by the Kohanim remained miraculously fresh
throughout the week. This was Hashem's indication that the legacy of
spirituality established by Sarah had endured.

The third miracle in Sarah's midst - the cloud of the Divine Presence that
hovered over her home - was literally a visual link between heaven and earth.
Regardless of time of day or change in weather, it persisted as proof of a
spiritual domain beyond the five senses. The Divine cloud originated with
Sarah, who pioneered a relationship with G-d by creating a dwelling place for
Him in this world. A symbol of the Divine presence, the cloud reappeared at
key points in the development of the Jewish Nation - as a protective force
for the generation in the desert and as a sign of the presence of the Divine
at the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

For us today, although we no longer live in an era of open miracles such as
those fostered by Sarah, each time we use the physical for a higher purpose,
we create in ourselves a dwelling place for Hashem. In this way, the world
around us never becomes the be-all and-end-all that breeds discontent in so
many. Rather, for the Jew it remains a place where the mundane and routine
present opportunities to practice connecting to our spiritual Source. This
task is a challenge, especially when taken-on in the midst of a consumer
society devoted to convincing us that we are, in fact, bored and in need of
constant diversion. As Jews, we have the potential to walk the path of
Sarah, transforming and infusing meaning into every physical aspect of our
existence, each in our own way, on our own time and step by step

Responses to this class are encouraged. All questions will be answered via
email by Mrs.Leah Kohn. Please address inquiries to Lkohn@Torah.org.